Jeff Meyerson talks to Jun Rao, a software engineer and researcher (formerly of LinkedIn). Jun has spent much of his time researching MapReduce, scalable databases, query processing, and other facets of the data warehouse. For the past three years, he has been a committer to the Apache Kafka project. Jeff and Jun first compare streaming to messaging, and the frameworks that support each. Kafka is a big data messaging or pub/sub system. Traditionally, these are two different types of systems, but the lines have become blurred recently. Kafka can also be looked at as a distributed commit log. Next, they discuss the vocabulary of Kafka, including producers and consumers. They wrap up by exploring Kafka from the perspective of durability and reliability and discuss some failure cases.